InGAME
About
InGAME: Innovation for Games and Media Enterprise establishes a dedicated creative research and development centre at the heart of Dundee’s games cluster with a view to driving product, service and experience innovation across the industry.
As cultural artefacts, video games are complex multi-faceted products with multiple creative practices, bringing together technical and commercial expertise in a disruptive and precarious environment. Led by Abertay University, in partnership with the University of Dundee and the University of St Andrews, InGAME forms a collaborative network around the expertise and experience held in the Dundee games cluster, the HEI partnership, the wider creative district, and sector support agencies to intensify economic growth, sector diversification and cultural engagement.
The Programme
Three high-level challenges face the cluster. These are, firstly, creative risk, as the financial risk that comes with developing speculative original IP for the games market is often fatal for start-up and micro-SMEs. Secondly, technology innovations within the cluster, though often iterative, inventive and ingenious, are not systematically captured or tested for generalisation or re-use value. This leads to missed commercial opportunities.
Finally, although the cluster is comprised primarily of mid-sized SMEs and an even larger number of startups and micro-SMEs, these smaller organisations often lack the commercial expertise to innovate new business models and recognise new market opportunities.
In response, a series of goals have been identified to create the conditions for sustainable creative speculation, technology innovation, economic growth and cluster intensification.
These goals include setting up new modes of collaboration among industry, HEIs, and sector support agencies; developing the cluster’s capacity to exploit technical innovations and improving access to high cost development services through a network of HEI & industry partners; increasing access to postgraduate research, creative and design, and the development of a workforce to enable creation of original content, and building a new
generation of creative R&D practitioners.
The Partnership
The programme is led by Abertay University, in partnership with the University of Dundee and the University of St Andrews, in collaboration with local industry stakeholders. These include 4J Studios, All4Games, BBC, Beano Studios, Biome Collective, DeltaDNA, Microsoft, Outplay Entertainment and Sony Interactive Entertainment Europe.
Business and cluster development is supported by Creative Dundee, Creative Scotland, Elevator UK, Interface, Dundee City Council, Scottish Enterprise, TIGA, Ukie, UK Games Fund and V&A Dundee.